It's almost vanished beyond the horizon of acceptable thought now that vast percentages of the Western world have been double or tripple vaxxed. But rejecting gratuitous displays of forced compliance isn't dead just yet.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Masked ballerina children. If there is anyone that should have no fear of COVID, it is young, healthy and fit children. For them, the threat from COVID, as reported also in the New York Times, is almost unquantifiable, less that that from the flu, and 'less than a vaccinated 70-yearold'. According to the CDC, approximately 75% all covid deaths occur in those 65-years and higher, ~96% over 45, and only 4% under 45, the largest percentage (~26%) over 85-years. Of the almost 773,812-deaths 'involving COVID', only 621(0.08%) were in children under 18. Additionally according to the CDC, 95% of all deaths occur in conjunction with serious underlying chronic disease comorbidities like dementia, influenza, hypertension, diabetes and that of the remaining 5% there is likely a 'lack of detail listed about the other conditions present at the time of death'.

We now also know the vaccines do not prevent transmission of the virus. While they reduce by a fractional amount transmission for the first three months after inoculation (depending on the study), after that time there is no difference¹. And while protection from serious illness and hospitalization does persist longer than this, the overall effectiveness of the vaccines wanes, particularly from symptomatic infection, which declines dramatically after only a few short months².

All of this undermines the headline of another contemporaneously published Times article, claiming that parents 'who have been forced to view their children...as victims of isolation and as potential vectors of infection' are now 'racing to inoculate their 5-to-11-year-old children'. Which raises the questions:why are children still being forced to wear masks, or for that matter, to be vaccinated?

Interestingly, as with nearly everything with this virus, the answer lies in a linguistic/narrative analysis of the claims made in the Times, claims that are made in such a way that they seem to be the disembodied, objective result of external forces. That parents have been 'forced' to view their children in this way is no doubt an honest admission. However, rather than this 'forcing' arising from the objective facts of the deadly threat of the virus, the truth is that framing the situation in this way is a dishonest slight of hand that allows the Times to simply expand on their previous position on the virus and their guidance vis a vi children, masking and vaccination without questioning them while simultaneously creating plausible deniability that they still make those claims or ever have.

It is a science fiction that we are actually involved in a rational, deliberate, reasoned response to a global pandemic. Not that it is a fiction that we are involved in a pandemic; but that the science and our relationship to it becomes, as a whole, a fiction through which we convince ourselves that what we are going through will eventually be resolved through the strict application of human intelligence. The result of this is that while sourcing science that undermines the fantastical and false claims around the virus in the mainstream media might seem to present a radical critique and a liberation from the current situation, it quickly becomes evident that articulating a science-based argument finds itself captured again by the paralysis of inaction that simply refuses to believe in any science (or at least looks on it very suspiciously) that doesn't prima facie validate the pandemic strategies seemingly outlined in full-cloth at the beginning of the pandemic (e.g., the 'science' of lockdowns) and the morality with which they are infused.

In this way, the vaccines that don't prevent spread and whose effectiveness wanes, becomes again the moral argument about vaccination to prevent hospitalization to prevent systemic failure of the healthcare system and the second-order death that produces as a result of the inaccessibility of the system for the treatment of other non-COVID related illness resulting from the 'burden' of the unvaccinated. The point is not only that there will always be contradictory science, differences of opinion and counter-claims; nor is it only that a partisan opponent will always find some other straw to cling to. Rather, the point is that once one has decided that the COVID pandemic is a scientific problem, one's rational faculties then become dedicated simply to an in vacuo analysis of all of the various dimensions of the virus, what is possible with this, the death count over there, the exponential curve here, the systemic risk there, the cultural factors over there, the gene sequence in that population there..

The problem with this is two-fold: on the one hand, one becomes a hostage to a discourse through which one's reasoning becomes bound to that reflected in mainstream media that looks suspiciously on independent thought whose politics aren't only about strengthening the already suffocating consensus. On the other hand, it is the cultural expression of an indulgent, secure, sequestered life that has the luxury of having the time, space and economic support to engage in such a reasoned debate about issues that unquestionably have serious moral, political and economic implications and are not simply issues of 'public health' for which the current state of exception can proceed indefinitely.

The virtuous and legitimate idea that science operates according to a democratic principle through which it becomes refined to bare truth through argument and encounter with other 'experts' has today been rendered into the farcical 'scientism' we see taking place through the mass-media. It's not only that a lot of the most widely reported 'science' is funded by pharmaceutical companies who conduct their own tests on their own emergency vaccines; its not only the lack of motivation to test any unprofitable existing medication or treatment strategy that would undermine corporate bottom lines; or that the media has become corrupted by their advertising dollars; or politicians by their donations. Rather it is that the perverted, impoverished representation of science in our media and the partisan charlatans who misrepresent and misdirect it has created a global enlightenment hallucination, a simulacrum within which rationality and morality ostensibly dedicated to elaborating a societal scientific endeavor produces the global scientific zombie whose only purpose is to keep thinking scientifically.

Which brings us back to the image of the masked children ballerinas. COVID has become a vehicle for the expression of the worst of liberal culture. It's politics and governance has also become exposed in all its authoritarian, dishonest, manipulative, unaccountable rancidity for all to see. What one sees in these photos of masked children is simply naive obedience to the knowingly unsubstantiated whims of an older class of citizen able to exert their political will to force their compliance. It is the smile of the Stockholm syndrome hostage that tells the abuser that their coercion has become internalized through which they extract a perverse sociopathic satisfaction.

In this sense 'scientism' is a description of the entire human assemblage held captive to the morality of the broad contours of a COVID strategy whose fundamental guardrails (vaccines, lockdowns, and masks) simply cannot be challenged. Thinking scientifically in the interest of the public health has become about the meticulous calculation of risks and all of the various hedges one can put in place to reduce risks to zero. Fundamentally, it is also a matter of belief since the situation is contingent and every possibility cannot be known. One decides on a certain course of action in the public's best interest and then proceeds to elaborate it more fully and to ensure it is implementation. Contradictions are part of the process and should be engaged to the point of exposing whether or not they adhere to core (moral) principles already part of the pervasive represented consensus. To the extent that they do not, they will be excluded, policed, and repressed until such time that they can once again accept the needle and rejoin society, in all of its creative and artistic, now only temporarily repressed for its own good.

Footnotes